An Infrastructure for the Collaborative Construction of Digital Theses Repositories

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Community Tales

An Infrastructure for the Collaborative Construction of Digital Theses Repositories

Lourdes Fernandez Ramirez J. Alfredo Sánchez

Universidad de las Américas, Puebla {lulu, alfredo}@mail.udlap.mx Cholula Puebla, Mexico biblio.udlap.mx/tesis

Keywords: Requirements, repository construction, interoperability

Abstract

”Tales” (pronounced tä’lez in Spanish) is the codename for the ongoing project aimed at the construction of the digital theses col- lection and associated services at Universidad de las Américas, Puebla (UDLA). UDLA is the first university in Mexico to approve a digital thesis requirement for all its academic programs and only one out of three in Latin America that have similar projects. We would like to share how our project has evolved from an early pro- totype onto a full-fledged SYSTEM involving automated upload facilities and complex search, navigation and federation mecha- nisms. The Libraries Division started the Tales project in the fall of 1999, when one pilot academic department committed to requir- ing digital theses and to incorporate them into the repository.

Today, Tales implements an institutional policy, which requires that all university departments participate in some way in the construc- tion of the repository. Our thesis repository participates in NDLTD and the OAI initiative.

Introduction

Digital libraries (DLs) are changing radically the ways in which traditional libraries managed their resources and offered services to users. DLs allow for the development of new ways of representing, using, generating and dis- seminating knowledge. They also promote new work practices and new ways of expressing and solving prob- lems. We have conducted work on a university-wide project to produce a repository of digital theses and a wide range of retrieval and navigation services. This work is part of a long-term digital libraries program. In this paper, we describe how the introduction of a digital theses requirement is changing work practices and opening new opportunities for collaboration among students, academic departments and librarians inside and outside our institution.

University Digital Libraries for All (U-DL-A) Our work is framed by an ambitious digital libraries program we have termed University Digital Libraries for All (U-DL-A), documented elsewhere [Sánchez 2001, Sánchez and Arias 2003]. U-DL-A has produced a digital libraries environment that now comprises various collections, services and user interfaces. One of our most im-

portant repositories is the collection of digital theses, which has observed a significant growth starting the current semester. Other collections include the university publications and historic archives in the libraries’s special collections. Services vary from information retrieval methods to agent services to navigation mechanisms. Fi- nally, user interfaces include personal and group spaces, visualization aids and user agents (publications concern- ing this work can be found at [ICT 2003]). Our work on digital theses was initiated in the context of the Net- worked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations initiative (NDLTD) [Fox et al. 2001].

Theses at UDLA

Every year, about 900 theses are generated by graduating students of Universidad de las Américas, Puebla (UDLA), out of which approximately 10% are produced by graduate students (the education SYSTEM in Mexico requires a thesis for all the five-year bachelor’s degree programs).

Due to space limitations, UDLA’s library has received and maintained hardcopies only of graduate theses.

Printed and bound copies of undergraduate theses have been made available via the academic departments. Un- der these circumstances, finding theses on a specific topic can be a strenuous and often frustrating task, as departments do not usually keep their catalogs up to date, loan policies vary and are seldom enforced, and office hours and storage space are typically limited.

We thus set out to build Tales, the technological and organizational environment that facilitates the dynamic, collaborative construction of the digital theses compo- nent of our digital library. Among the advantages we have kept in mind as we developed Tales, the following have been key to foster user involvement:

• Availability. Theses can be made available for the en- tire university community or to the general public.

The digital collection does not have restrictions as for number of available copies, physical space or office hours.

• Electronic storage. It is no longer necessary for the departments to store physically the documents.

Some departments do not have enough space for storing them or personnel for their administration.

• Cost reduction. Student save money typically spent for printing and binding.

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• Searching and browsing facilities. Ease of retrieval and navigation are but two of the advantages of the digital substrate that make digital theses appealing to be used for supporting new research endeavors.

Tales has evolved significantly from its inception as a prototype to its current university-wide deployment, which has allowed for the establishment of a digital theses requirement for all the institution’s academic programs.

In the remainder of this document, we briefly describe this evolution and the main features of the resulting environment.

Tales:

From prototype to deployment

The Tales project started in 1999 as one of the components of our digital libraries program. Tales aimed at contributing to the construction of digital collections in Span- ish and serving as a platform for research of open issues in digital libraries. Our approach was to first demonstrate the benefits and advantages of creating a digital collection while developing and testing tools to support the work- flow and general browsing and searching services. We invited one academic department to function as pilot group. The process began with the students, who submitted their theses on floppy or compact disks, in at least one of the allowed formats (MS-Word, HTML and La- TeX). We selected HTML as display and unification format. Every submitted thesis was converted into this format. Documents were parsed and stored according to the ETD-ML definition [Kipp et al. 1997]. Once each ele- ment was identified and stored we were able to recon- struct the thesis on demand to support various navigation and searching mechanisms. After two semesters of successful operation, we also invited our master’s programs to participate in the effort. Our collection grew modestly but this stage allowed our group to concen- trate on the development of required facilities to convert among formats, to parse and to upload documents and generally to gain experience and to work with other are- as in the definition of policies and procedures for a wider use of Tales.

During the pilot operation, we built facilities for auto- mating various processes and we also explored interoperability issues in the context of NDLTD and the Open Archives Initiative. Finally, the digital thesis requirement was approved by the academic council for all the academic programs starting the 2003 Spring Semester.

UDLA is the first university in Mexico to establish a digital thesis requirement for all its academic programs and, at the time of this writing, only one out of three in Latin America that have similar projects. As the volume of theses to be handled every semester has increased, it

has been necessary to design facilities for allowing all involved parties to collaborate in the construction of the theses collection. Thus, responsibilities have been assigned to participants as follows:

• The registrar's office provides course and student list- ings related to thesis projects

• Academic departments update thesis committees and also validate that the requirement has been satis- fied prior to graduation,

• Students upload documents,

• Advisors review and approve theses for publication in one of various available modalities, and

• Library personnel provides technical support, main- tains the collection and runs processes to make the documents available via the web.

Tales conceptual design

Tales has been designed to facilitate collaboration throughout the theses process, from document submission to publication and use, including functionality for data and information retrieval, browsing and searching services and interoperability with other collections. Every semester, a setup stage feeds databases with information on students, courses and professors. Academic departments or theses coordinators define the composition of thesis committees. Student submit their documents and advisors may approve the document for publication.

Each of the participants interact with Tales via web interfaces customized according to their roles. We selected HTML as storage format though we are in the process of moving to XML. At present, the display format could be HTML or PDF (generated from HTML). Additional issues involved in the design of the Tales environment are pro- vided below.

Data Model

Two aspects were considered when designing Tales’ data model: integration with other U-DL-A components and the structure of the theses themselves. The latter was based on the data type definition for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD-ML). Only those elements rele- vant for our project were selected considering thesis reg- ulations for our university. As for its incorporation into U- DL-A, the roles played by users had to be modeled along with data such as majors, academic departments, and organizational relationships. The Dublin Core metadata has been considered.

Authors

All graduating students are registered as authors in the Tales environment. They are required to submit each section of their documents (preliminary pages, tables of

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contents, chapters, appendices, references and so on) in two formats: PDF and its source format (typically MS Word). Authors are allowed to update the descriptive metadata of their thesis (title, date and place of exam de- fense, email). Files can be uploaded individually or as a compressed package. Students are notified by email whether the process has been completed successfully or corrections are needed.

Academic departments

Academic departments’ administrators are in charge of registering all the evaluation committees for the students of all majors associated to the department. Initially this task is assigned to the instructor in charge of coordinating all thesis students. Other users may be added to do this task.

Thesis advisors

Once authors have submitted their theses, advisors are also notified. Advisors are expected to revise the submission and make sure authors submitted a complete and authorized version of the document. After revising and approving the thesis, the advisor will specify the access level for the thesis: restricted (only advisor and authors can see it); local (for campus only) or global (open to the general public). Once this has been done, the advisor re- leases the thesis for publication.

Library personnel

Once a thesis is deemed complete, it becomes part of the collection and its contents become accessible to users as specified by the thesis’ advisor. The digital librarian initiates additional processes for structural recognition so tables of contents and indices that will facilitate content- based queries are constructed.

User Services

We decided to provide access to the collection through two main interfaces: one for searching and another for browsing. Additionally, we aimed to provide transparent access to other collections in a federation.

Two basic types of searching mechanisms were considered for Tales. The first type considers data retrieval, which entails direct matching of query terms with specific

text in the database; the second type involves using mechanisms from the field of Information Retrieval (IR).

In this respect we have taken advantage of ongoing de- velopments in the context of U-DL-A, such as a server and library of information retrieval models.

As for navigation means, we opted for providing access through lists of theses references linked to the contents, which are properly segmented for easy browsing. Each page must contain the complete bibliographic reference and links to other sections of the thesis to facilitate navigation and references to specific sections of the document. This is of particular importance if we consider that search engines can find any portion of a thesis, so every page must give contextual information. Segmenting also reduces downloading time and helps users to view documents quickly.

From its inception, we conceived of our digital thesis effort as a participant of a growing international community. We adhered to the NDLTD project and devised mechanisms for integration under the guidelines of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).

Implementation

All the tools were implemented using Java. Access to services only requires a web browser, as interfaces were implemented as Java Servlets. Display of PDF files requires Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Our database manage- ment SYSTEM is MySQL, which is accessed by means of other services developed within U-DL-A.

Let us illustrate how the Tales environment facilitates the construction of a collection of digital thesis. The process begins with the academic department’s administrators. They are responsible for registering the evaluation committees. Figure 1 shows the SYSTEM options available for these users. On the left side, the main options include registering committees, updating committee’s data, changing participants’ roles, and viewing the department’s data (professors and students). The right side shows how the registration of the committee can be done: the selection boxes include all the department’s professors; extra buttons allow for adding professors from other departments or from other institutions.

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Figure 1: Academic department’s interface.

Students are expected to update their general information (email address, thesis title, place and date of the exam), may add coauthors and submit their files. As

shown in Figure 2, files are uploaded in groups of five;

compressed and packaged files are also accepted.

Figure 2: Authors’ interfaces.

Once an author has uploaded a thesis, the advisor will receive a notification. When advisors enter the SYSTEM;

a list of studens and the number of files that have been uploaded will be displayed. Typically, at this point the student and the advisor have agreed on a final version of the document after several revisions (which can be done ei- ther electronically or on paper); the advisor’s task is to verify whether the submitted version corresponds to the most recent version of the document. The interface used by advisors is shown in Figure 3. The advisor may review

each of the received files, add comments or mark the document as complete and specify the desired access type. An e-mail message is sent to the author upon com- pletion of the review process. On the left window, the files are separated into three sections: pending revision, with comments and complete. On the right window, an in- terface is presented that allows advisors to send an e- mail message to authors, including all comments on the submission. Advisors may add or remove comments as desired.

Figure 3: Advisors’ interfaces.

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Figure 4 shows the main browsing interface for the results of a search process. The browsing interface is divid- ed into three sections. The top section shows initials linked to authors’ last names and their theses. The second section lists theses from undergraduate majors whereas the third section lists theses produced by gradu-

ate students. Search results may be ordered by author, title, major or year. Since search is possible practically on any portion of the thesis (figures, formulae, references, etc.), the first column indicates where in the document terms were found and links that can be followed on to that section.

Figure 4: Browsing and searching in Tales.

When a thesis is selected from the list, the corre- sponding section will be displayed as a PDF file highlight- ing query terms contained in the document. This is ex- emplified in Figure 5. Except for the table of contents and

the cover page, which are displayed in HTML, all other sections are displayed using the PDF files. For the generated PDFs, a navigation bar and next/back buttons allow users to move to any section of the document.

Figure 5: Viewing a digital thesis in Tales.

We have implemented federation mechanisms that allow users to retrieve documents from other collections in response to queries posed in Tales. Specifically, we have implemented mobile agents that traverse the net- work and gather documents from two partner institutions (technical reports from another institution in Mexi- co and theses from Virginia Tech in the US) and present them to the user in a transparent fashion [Sánchez et al.

2002]. A server has been built that is compliant with the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and allows for external clients to query Tales.

As for IR facilities, we have successfully tested our Hermes server and IR model library [Maldonado-Naude and Sánchez 2003] using Tales, in such a way that ranked results can be obtained using the vector space, extended boolean and latent semantic indexing models.

Work in progress

We expect our collection to include about 600 theses by the end our Summer Semester. At present, theses contain mostly text and images but we are encouraging the use of media such as audio, video and three-dimensional models. We are also exploring alternatives for data de- scription and identification and we now have a parallel development using XML. We plan to complete the integration of Tales and our IR facilities this year. Also, other services for digital collections are in progress.

We have developed a tool named Poseidon [Sanchez and Flores 2002], which makes it possible to review and annotate digital documents. The advisor and other committee make comments on the thesis using this tool. Stu- dents review annotations and update the document.

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Once the thesis is completed, it is automatically integrat- ed to the collection. The integration of this tool into Tales is also planned for this year.

One recurring concern among Tales users is plagiarism.

For this reason, we have started the development of tools for detecting similarity between documents also using our IR server. This tool considers comparing internal documents (from our collection) as well as external thesis and web pages.

Considering the growing volume of images that are comprised by Tales, we have started a project for content-based queries on images in our theses collection.

Conclusions

Tales is a collaborative environment that is facilitating the construction of a repository of digital thesis. Though a stable state of Tales should be reached in about a year after the approval of a digital thesis requirement, it is clear that it is contributing to changing work practices and opening new possibilities for expressing and disseminat- ing knowledge. Still at the early stages of the collection, we are getting around 140 visitors per day at http://bib- lio.udlap.mx/tesis. Statistics show that that most of our vis- itors come from Latin America. We believe Tales will contribute to make knowledge more accessible to wider user communities and will be helpful as a platform for research in open issues in digital libraries.

Acknowledgements

This work is partly supported by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt Projects No. 35804-A and G33009-A).

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